This morning, two critical PHP Security Advisories were published: RCE via OOM corruption (9.2/10) RCE via stale global state (9.2/10) If you're running PHP for any service, you need to upgrade immediately to 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, or 8.5.12. And if you use Remi's repos on RedHat-derivative Linux distros, you need to switch to official repos temporarily as Remi's on vacation and can't update his community repo. (Reminds me of xkcd 2347 ). I'm glad I finished migrating this web...

Today I learned : ICANNWiki is an independent and not-for-profit encyclopedia about Internet Governance, unaffiliated with ICANN. It contains 11,046 articles. To contribute, read our content guide, then request an account. It’s an unofficial wiki, though ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) does sponsor it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-21. Today I learned : ICANNWiki is an independent and not-for-profit encyclopedia about Internet Governance,...

Hooman, we are ready to receive your apple core. 🍎 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Hooman, we are ready to receive your apple core. 🍎 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so ar...

I now follow three websites or feeds whose authors write in French; in at least two cases, the authors write in both French and English. When I see posts in different languages, I use Firefox’s Translate feature to read them. Firefox Translate is not perfect, but as long as I can get the gist of something I am happy (although suggestions for better translation practices, ideally locally, and without complex, internet-connected, or paid technology, would be sincerely appreciated!). Now that I...

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example, we created Slack channels where we tasked Claude with being obsessively focused on the health of a single component. We call these Claudes “superfans.” We have a scion-daemon superfan, a...

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Astrolab is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the third year in a row! 🌙 California-based Astrolab is developing large multi-purpose rovers called FLIP and FLEX for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. The first FLIP rover is slated to fly on Astrobotic’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander . And NASA has selected a FLEX rover as one of its two Artemis crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicles, ...

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. 1 In this article, I examine the 8087...

One of the most wonderful aspects of math is how deep we can get by studying seemingly trivial questions. Consider the roots of unity, where "unity" simply means the number 1. Basics: roots of unity for real numbers Studying the roots of unity usually begins in middle school: what is the square root of 1? Equivalently, what are the solutions to this equation? \[x^2=1\] Well, there are two answers: 1 and -1. Similarly, we can ask the question for higher roots; the third roots are solu...

Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to figure out? I fear most people do not realize this last part: that when it takes time and effort from others to figure out what % is AI, and what % is YOU, then I will simply assume it’s probably 100% A...

My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones ( play it here ). Unlike my previous experiments , this one is actually fun to play . I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also supports multiplayer between nearby devices using audio to synchronize game state! Here's what I've built so far, and some of the things I learned along the way. Battle Drones ...

Decision models have exploded onto the scene recently, starting with TypeSafe’s Jev, followed by Perplexity’s Decider, Liquid’s d1, Cloudflare’s Clef, and OpenAI’s Decisions API 1 . These models promise fast, inexpensive classification. Decision models are an appealing low-cost alternative to LLM judges 2 for automated evals. But whether they’re the right choice depends on the cost, performance, and latency requirements of your use case. We’ve also noticed people using the def...

This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A training center has been running its simulator suite for eighteen months. Now operators are preparing for a mission in a new region. The intelligence office has fresh terrain and threat data, some of it too sensitive to leave the building.   Until the simulators are updated with that data, pilots and sensor operators cannot practice in the new environment. Can the training center make...

Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics , because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something 1 like this: It doesn’t matter how effective LLMs are at technical fields like programming or mathematics, because one of the essential values of those fields is that they’re art . While it looks to laypeople like these fields ...

So what to make of OpenAI and the future of Math? Here are some points I've either: thought of myself or heard from a human or read from an AI. Throughout this post I use the term AI to mean an AI system that produces mathematical results.  I decline to say  OpenAI or  Anthropic as generic terms since about 20 years ago I used  Intrade  as a generic term for Betting Markets---then Intrade went out of business.  I wish I had bet on that happening. Oh well. 1) Some of the proofs were L...

La Conquete, by Jose Clemente Orozco, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I was on MTS Live talking about robots, p...

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Yacine of Deep Learning with Yacine . He posed a lot of very thoughtful questions and I had a great time. Please check it out! The lightly edited transcript follows, auto-transcribed with faster-whisper and then reviewed by me for correctness, adding links for context, and editing out a lot of “I think” and “um” and “like” selectively. (Yacine) A lot of people asked me how to get into machine learning in 2026. Instead of giving you...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-109618 for the project PHP , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix multiple memory safety vulnerabilities that allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on your server. This isn't something you can just mitigate and be fine. You MUST patch this. Don't try to bargain here. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming...

We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it. Anyone who used email in the 1990s remembers a similar, primitive era, when worms and viruses briefly ruled the net. But the connected world of that time was too simple to sustain an ecosystem of rogue escapees. Even today, much of the intern...

I’m assuming you all gave a sigh of relief when you saw digital text rather than scans of my handwriting. This post is largely a set of updates and corrections to my previous post; given the lack of revisions I have some corrections to make. Beyond that, the lack of reflection on my thoughts during the editing process had me coming to realizations after hitting post, alongside a few misc updates. I’m assuming you all gave a sigh of relief when you saw digital text rather than scans of my ha...

Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out. It claimed to settle the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” — a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis, which is arguably the biggest open question in math. The new proof is, as Jared Duker Lichtman of Stanford University put it, “the most significant AI-for-math achievement so far, by quite a margin. Source Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out. It claimed to settle the ...

Chessbook-1, Maia-3 and Allie 2.0 at a glance Capability scorecard: a 0-100 grade per measurement, and whether the model has the capability at all. Predicting human moves Matching strength Time scramble play Predicting think time Predicting who wins Chessbook-1 199M parameters 96 / 100 81 / 100 84 / 100 98 / 100 97 / 100 Maia-3 79M parameters 85 / 100 56 / 100 57 / 100 No 80 / 100 Allie 2.0 5.6B parameters 99 / 100 48 / 100 99 / 100...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Many new printing options The Advanced print dialog has new options, each with a matching -print-settings value: Print each page at its document page size ( paper=auto ) for documents with mixed page sizes ( #533 ) Choose paper source by document page size ( bin=auto ) ( #349 ) Center page horizontally on the paper ( center ) ( #348 ) Stretch pages to fill paper ( stretch ) ( #2220 ) Rotate printout ( rotate=90|1...

We sometimes need to convert binary data to text. For example, your emails must be stored as text files. Naïvely, you could just use a string of 0 and 1 , but it would mean using one character per bit. We can do better by using 64 ASCII characters: all letters, all numbers, plus a few extra characters. Base64 represents three bytes with four ASCII characters. Base64 is how email carries attachments, how certificates are stored, how images get embedded in web pages (data URLs), and how bina...